I’ve been trying to find time the last few days to do a review of the movie Troy, and since my current pastime is putting off outlining I thought, hey, no time like the present.
Cast:
The movie stars Brad Pitt as “Brad Pitt/Achilles*.” A couple of times he attempts this kind of lame, vaguely-European-but-not-really, accent. Mostly he sounds like he just walked out of an El Pollo Loco in Southern California after a long weekend of surfing and watching 90210 reruns. He’s like Keanu Reeves meets Richard Gere, only more monotonous and less character driven. That being said, there are two almost all the way nude shots and lots of lingering scenes featuring Brad’s abs, arms, shoulders, legs, hair, eyes, muscles…a buffet of hotness if you will…unfortunately he talks a lot which ruins a huge portion of the shots. His talent is standing around looking pretty, not acting...I think someone forgot to tell him.
The rest of the cast is mainly a bunch of people I have no opinion about because they are either (a) not hot like Brad Pitt, or (b) not famous enough to not be hot. Eric Bana is probably the best of the lot as Hector, the elder Prince of Troy. Orlando Bloom, surprisingly un-hot as a curly-headed brunette, puts on an entirely uninspiring performance as the younger Prince of Troy, and the lover of Helen…pretty much the one that gets everyone into the whole mess. There is NO chemistry between Orlando Bloom and the girl who plays Helen. Even when they showed Orlando almost naked in a love scene it was creepy because (a) my parents were sitting there, and (b) it looked like he was making out with his much more genetically blessed sister. The girl that played Helen of Troy had a strange accent that I couldn’t ascertain the fakeness of…she was beautiful though…so, whatever, a thousand ships…OK.
Plot:
The plot is basically comprised of the director shoving the following message down our throats: ACHILLES IS THE SERVANT OF NO KING. Got it. Now, unless we’re gonna see some naked Brad, let’s move on to some other point…Brad’s not a good enough actor to carry that line once, let alone forty times. The rest of the movie was pretty much taken up by gory battles followed by all-night bonfires to cremate the dead soldiers. What a great escape from law school. Seriously.
Overall:
It’s kind of entertaining…if my parents hadn’t paid for it, and if I wasn’t promised a HUGE Diet Coke, I would probably wait until it came out on video.
*Not to be confused with Brad Pitt/Joe Black, Brad Pitt/Tristan Ludlow, or Brad Pitt/Rory Devaney.
